Pages We Leave Open · Book 2

Everything We Leave Blank: A Novel

Chapter One: The Rememberer

Six weeks from the Tuesday this story starts, I would come downstairs into my own kitchen, look at the boy eating cereal at the island, and not know who he was. He was my son. He was thirteen by then. He had my father’s ears and his own way of holding a spoon, and I had carried him for nine months and fed him for thirteen years, and I stood in the doorway in my robe and tried to work out which neighbor’s kid had let himself in.

I am telling you now so you can watch it coming. I couldn’t.

The thing nobody tells you about beating the monster is that the job doesn’t end. It changes hands, or it changes shape, and either way you are still the one holding it at three in the morning.

I had thought, when it was over, when I sat in the dirt at the bottom of the worst book ever written and narrated a sunrise to a thing made of despair until it lay down in its first morning in three hundred years and let us go, I had thought that was the end of the sentence. The period. I had earned a period. I had paid for one in full, in the only currency that country accepted, which was my Tía Carmen, who walked into the gray with nearly three hundred years of family warmth in her arms and did not walk back out.

You do not get a period. Nobody in my family ever has. What you get is a comma, and a held breath, and the slow dawning understanding that a door you leave open stays open, and that the trouble with leaving the light on for the ones who come after you is that the light also shows the dark where you are standing.

But I am getting ahead. I always get ahead in the part where I am happy, and I was happy, those four years. I want that on the record before any of the rest of it, the way I wanted the in and out underlined the first time: for almost four years, we were happy, and it was ordinary, and I have learned to say so out loud, because the saying is the whole thing. The saying is the only weapon I have ever had that worked.

Here is what ordinary looked like, after.

I wrote. That is the headline, and it still surprises me to type it. The woman who spent thirty-six years hiding in the downstairs bathroom with her back against the door, reading other people’s sentences because her own life did not have a single line in it that said Sonya is allowed. That woman got up off the floor and started writing them. At the kitchen island the size of a small fishing boat, out loud half the time, narrating into the steam off my coffee while Seba somehow got cereal in his hair at nine in the morning, and RJ corrected my facts, and Rego came in gray with cement dust and read over my shoulder and said the thing his own father never learned to say, the thing he first said to me at twenty-five and learned the full weight of in a gray country at the end of the world: how’s it end.

I was writing it down, all of it, the wanting and the hiding and the structuring and the dragon and the parking lot and the salt and the sand in the bed. The book you are holding the second of. I was writing the true one, those years, because Carmen made me promise two things with the last of her, and the first was tell the children about me, and a promise is a kind of book you build one sentence at a time, so I built it. I sat in the green wingback chair that did not match a single thing in the house, the one thing in four thousand square feet that knew me from before, and I wrote my dead aunt back into the daylight one true page at a time.

It was going to save my life, that habit. It was also, it turned out, the exact thing the new one came to eat first. But I did not know that yet. Those years I just knew that I had a green gem the size of my fist in my nightstand drawer that I never sold, that glowed faintly at night, that I had decided I did not need a new backsplash badly enough to find out what looking back would cost, and that for the first time in my life I was not afraid of the books on my shelf.

I should have stayed afraid. Fear is information. My whole family is built out of women who mistook the end of one fear for the end of all of them, and I had just done it again, and I want you to notice that I did it, because it is the most human thing in this whole book and I would do it again tomorrow.

RJ was twelve that fall, and Seba was nine, and the difference between my two sons had stopped being years and started being kind.

RJ was the watcher. He had always been the watcher, at nine he came at me from the side because he understood the front door is rarely the way in, but at twelve it had become the whole shape of him. Long, careful, all wrist and collarbone, Rego’s eyes and my mother’s stare, an unfair amount of seeing in one face. He corrected my facts. He noticed when a thing in a room had moved a quarter of an inch. He read the way I used to read, close and hungry, but what he took out of a book was never the wanting. It was the remembering. The keeping. The exact and merciless inventory of what had been there. I had filed that, in the first book, under of course he does, he’s mine, back when I still thought he’s mine was a comfort.

Seba was the walker. And that was the one that woke me at three in the morning with my heart going like a fist on a door.

He was nine and fearless as a brick, the same kid who at five had walked up to a demon at the end of the world and handed it a boot, because everybody needs a boot, and who had not, in the four years since, located the part of himself where ordinary children keep their fear, because I do not think he was issued one. He treated the entire world like a system with a solution you could reach if you just stopped being scared long enough to read the rules. Which is, it turns out, the exact temperament of a person who can walk into a book. The wanting had gotten me in. The fearlessness was going to get him in, and the fearlessness was going to be what got him hurt, because not-scared is the most dangerous thing you can be at the top of that particular high dive.

I had known it for a year and a half, since the morning I came down at three for water and found him, not RJ, the one I had braced for, but Seba, standing in front of my open nightstand drawer in the dark. Not reaching for the gem. Just leaning toward it, low and certain, his head tilted as you tilt your head at music coming from another room, the exact lean I used to do over a page before I knew what it was. The water reaching up for him before he had agreed to fall. And on his face, no fear at all. Wonder. The thing I would have given both hands to put there, in any other context, in front of any other drawer.

I closed the drawer. I told him it was a school night. I did not tell him what warm meant, what the lean was, what the gem was, what he was. I bought myself a year and a half of being the mother of a boy who only read books, and I was greedy about it the way I have always been greedy, and I spent every month of it doing the one thing my own mother did. The thing I swore in the gold I would never do.

My mother hid it. You know that part if you read the first book, but there is a corner of it I did not know then, and it is the hinge the whole second half of my life swings on, so I will tell it the way Carmen told it to me, flat, at her kitchen table, with the votive going: my mother saw a tall faceless man drawn in crayon on the refrigerator, drawn by me, at four, a child drawing the thing in her blood the way a child draws the sun. And she packed a bag and drove to Carmen crying, and Carmen taught her the salt and the names and the way through, the whole inheritance, and my mother listened to all of it and then she took me home and she chose, with both hands, eyes open, to teach me none of it. To pretend. To raise me with the batteries taken out of the smoke detector, guarding the door from the kitchen table, because she could not bear to hand her daughter a map of the dark and call it love. She kept the gift for herself, quietly, in the romance novels on her nightstand, and in the end she went into one of them and did not come out, and we buried a woman who looked asleep.

I used to be angry about that. I am a mother now. I understand it the way you understand a thing in the back of your neck. My mother looked at the inheritance and decided that ignorance was a gift she could give me, the only one in the catalog she could afford, and she was wrong, and it nearly killed me, and it cost me Carmen, and I have stood in my own kitchen at three in the morning with a fearless boy down the hall who leans toward drawers, and I have wanted to give him that same wrong gift so badly my teeth ached.

So you understand the conditions. You understand the pressure system. I am not making excuses. I am doing the opposite. I am telling you that when the first one went, I almost let it go, because letting things go was the family skill, and I am very, very good at it.

The first one was a Tuesday, because of course it was. It is always a Tuesday in this family, the good ones and the worst ones both.

*

RJ was reading over my shoulder at the island, which he did now, openly, as you stand near a stove you are not allowed to touch. Seba was outside being a weather system. I had the manuscript up, the first book, this book’s older sister, somewhere in the bright stupid happy middle of it, the funding-run part, where I robbed a hundred worlds and dressed it up as funding the college accounts. And RJ, in the flat careful voice he used for facts, the auditor’s voice, said:

“Where’s the part about the laundromat?”

“Which part, baby?”

“The part where you bought it back. You read it to me.” He was not looking at me. He was looking at the screen, at the place a thing was supposed to be, the way he looked at a noise the house made at three a.m. “The lady’s daughter ran it now, and you overpaid for a year of wash-and-fold you’d never use, just to put money into the building that raised you. You cried in the car after. You said nobody in the whole world knew how.”

I looked at the screen.

I want to describe this exactly, because everything that comes after lives or dies on whether you believe this one thing happened, same as last time. I scrolled. The chapter was there. The funding run was there, the coin dealer, the auction man, Donna at the bank with her kind warning face. But the laundromat, the buying-it-back, the daughter, the year of wash-and-fold, the crying in the lot, was not. There was no gap where it had been. The sentences on either side ran into each other smooth as a healed-over place on skin, no scar, no seam, the paragraph closed around the absence the way water closes over a stone.

And here is the part that put the cold hand behind my navel, the part I have never been able to make anyone feel who was not standing in my kitchen that morning: I did not remember writing it. I did not remember doing it. I reached for the memory of buying back the laundromat, the thumping, humming building I grew up over, the dryers like a second heartbeat, and there was nothing there to reach. Not a hole. Holes you can feel. This was smooth. This was a wall where a door used to be, painted the same color as the rest of the wall, by someone who had been very, very careful.

But RJ remembered. RJ, who corrected facts and did not invent them, who in his whole twelve years had never once made a thing up, because making things up is for people who cannot bear what is real, and my son could bear anything, RJ remembered a thing that I, who had lived it, no longer could.

“You’re sure,” I said. My voice was level. It is always level when I am most afraid; it is the voice I used on the bridge of a starship and the voice I use at the pediatrician. “You’re sure I read you that.”

“You read it to me a year ago. I have it.” He turned and looked at me then, and the seeing in his face was the whole problem; the seeing was Carmen’s and my mother’s and Aurelia’s and three hundred years of women who saw. “Mom. Why don’t you?”

It was not a question a twelve-year-old should be able to ask. It was barely a question. It was the first cold edge of the whole rest of it, sliding into the warm kitchen on a Tuesday morning, and I did the thing I am most ashamed of and tell the fastest: I told him he must have dreamed it, and I closed the laptop, and I made the boys eggs.

I almost made it stick. I am good at stories; it is the one thing I have always been good at, telling myself the version I can live in. I told myself a tired writer forgets what she cut. I told myself a kid conflates the things you read him. I told myself a great many things over those eggs, which is how I know, looking back, that some part of me already knew it was something, the same way I knew the morning the sand showed up in my bed, a hundred crossings and one whole demon ago.

Then I went to check the one thing I could not lose.

*

The one thing I could not lose was the night Seba was born.

That is the thing I went to check, standing in my kitchen with the first cold understanding crawling up my spine, because if a thing was loose that ate the parts where we won, then I needed to know it had not yet gotten to the part of me that was load-bearing, the part everything else hangs on. So I closed my eyes at my own sink and I reached for it the way you reach for a tooth with your tongue, the night in the garage, the way he came at me from the side, the specific animal sound I made, the weight of him, nine years ago, the start of the boy who would turn out to be the walker, and it was there. It was all there. I almost cried with the relief of it, the whole night intact, every detail, my younger son’s arrival still bolted down in me where nothing could reach it.

It would not be there in six weeks. I want you to hold that, the way I have had to hold it: standing at my sink that first Tuesday, I checked the one memory I could not bear to lose, and found it whole, and was comforted, and whatever was already loose in my house heard me check it, I think, heard which door I had decided was load-bearing, and made a note, as a patient burglar notes which window the family checks last before bed. It took the night Seba was born within the first few weeks. I have it now only because my husband wrote down what I told him before it went. I check it still, every morning, with my tongue against the tooth that isn’t there, and every morning I read the night my son was born off a page in another man’s handwriting, and I have made my peace with it, as you make your peace with a thing by deciding to, daily, forever, because the alternative is to let it take that too.

*

Carmen’s house was ours now. We had not been able to sell it and had not tried; you do not sell the room where the salt is kept. We drove out on Sundays and I dusted the locked books behind their glass, the family books, the bloodline written down in a hand going back further than the country we were standing in, and I let Seba run feral in the yard where Sister Rosa’s God could not log it, and I sat at the table where Carmen had taught me the whole inheritance in one long terrible afternoon, and I remembered her. On purpose. Out loud. Because I had promised.

That Tuesday I did not wait for Sunday. I drove out at eleven with the laptop on the passenger seat like a thing that might bite, and I let myself in, and I stood in front of the glass case, and I reached for Carmen the way you reach for a banister in the dark.

She was there. I want to be clear that she was there. The eighty-one years of her, the funerals and the conchas and the telenovelas watched with a border guard’s vigilance, the way she had held my old head in her open empty hands at the end and made me swear. All there. I almost cried with the relief of it, standing in her kitchen with the dust motes going gold in the afternoon light.

And then I looked at the books.

There were nine of them in the case. I had counted them a hundred times; counting was the railing I held in that room, the way precision was RJ’s. Nine books, oldest at the bottom, the spines a row of dark teeth three hundred years deep. I counted nine that Tuesday and I felt the floor of myself give, very quietly, as a thing gives before it makes a sound, because the oldest one, the bottom one, the one Carmen called the first letter, the one a later Lectora’s own hand had started.

Was blank.

Not empty. Not missing. Blank. The cover was there, the leather, the weight of it when I took it down with hands that did not feel like mine; the pages were there, all of them, cream and soft with age. And every single one was white. Not faded. Not washed out. White the way a page is white before anyone has been brave enough, or frightened enough, or in love enough, to put the first word on it. Three hundred years of the women in my blood writing down how to survive the dark, gone, with no hole where it had been, the book closed smooth around the absence, and only me left holding the shape of what should have been written as it faded out of my hands like warmth off a doubloon.

I had left a door open. In a book, on a shelf, a little warmer than the books around it. I had left it open on purpose, with love, so the next frightened hungry hiding-in-the-bathroom woman in my blood would find her way in when she needed it, the way I found mine. It was the bravest thing I had ever done that did not involve a sword. We are a family of women who leave doors.

I had not once considered that a door is only a hole you have decided to be proud of.

And that anything can use a hole.

My phone buzzed in Carmen’s silent kitchen. RJ. He was supposed to be home, doing the reading log, watching his brother for the fifteen minutes it took me to drive out here and lose my mind politely among the dust motes.

“Mom.” Twelve years old, using the flat careful auditor’s voice, the one that meant he was holding very still around something. “Seba’s at your drawer again. He says the gem’s warm. He says…” a breath, and behind him I heard my nine-year-old say something bright and certain and terrible. “He says he found the door, and it’s a good one, it’s got a kid in it like him, and he wants to know if he can go say hi.”

“Don’t let him,” I said. “RJ. Do not let your brother near that drawer. I am coming, I am…”

“I can’t remember the laundromat.” He said it flat and fast, as you report a fever. “You said it this morning, the part I asked about. I had it this morning. I was going to tell you tonight that I still had it, that I could see it, the dryers and the lady’s daughter. And just now I went to check it the way you check a tooth, and it’s…” I heard him swallow three hundred years of family in one gulp. “It’s gone. Mom. Something’s eating the part where we won.”

I stood in my dead aunt’s kitchen with a blank book in my hands and a phone against my ear and my whole inheritance gone white, and I grasped three things at once, as you understand the floor is not there anymore.

The thing that had come through my open door did not kill. It un-wrote. And it was working backward through everything that had ever made us, the laundromat, the first letter, RJ’s perfect terrible memory, and soon, I already knew, soon, the eighty-one years of Carmen I had sworn on her empty hands to keep.

And the only door-walker left in my blood, the only one who could go in after it, was nine years old, and afraid of nothing, and standing at my nightstand drawer in the daylight asking if he could go say hi to a stranger in the dark.

My mother hid. I want you to remember that I told you that.

I picked up my keys, and I did not run, and that, heaven help me, is where the second one really starts.